A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (7 page)

While at Duke, Lemkin received a letter from his parents on a scrap of paper a quarter the size of a regular sheet. "We are well," the letter read. "We hope you are happy. We are thinking of you " Several days later, on June 24, 1941, he heard a radio broadcaster announce that the German army had declared war on the Soviet Union, abrogating the MolotovRibbentrop pact that had divided the country into a German and a Soviet zone. Hitler's forces were now storming into eastern Poland. Colleagues on campus asked, "Have you heard the news about the Nazis?" Lemkin, dazed and sullen, looked down. "Sorry," they said, pulling away.`"

Although Lemkin was panicked about the fate of his missing family, he busied himself by proselytizing about Hitler's crimes. The prevailing wisdom in the United States, as it had been in Lithuania, was that the Nazis were waging a war against Europe's armies. When Lemkin told U.S. government officials that Germany was also wiping out the Jews, he was greeted either with indifference or incredulity. But with Hitler's declaration of war against the United States, Lemkin, then fluent in nine languages, thought he might acquire more cachet. In June 1942 the Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration in Washington, I).C., hired hint as chief consultant, and in 1944 the U.S. War Department brought him on board as an international law expert. But his horror stories were not a U.S. governmental concern. "My companions were mildly and only politely interested," he remembered. "Their attention was rather absorbed by their own assignments....They were masters in switching the discussion in their direction. '-

Lemkin reached out to those at the top. He met with Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's vice president, and attempted to personalize his message. Ahead of the meeting, he had studied up on the Tennessee Valley Authority project on irrigation, which he knew would interest Wallace. Because the vice president had been raised in the cornfields of Iowa, Lemkin also slipped in references to his farm upbringing. Lemkin niet with Wallace on several occasions and introduced his proposals to ban the destruction of peoples."I looked hopefully for a reaction," Lemkin remembered. "There was none."2'

Lemkin next tried to approach President Roosevelt directly. An aide urged him to summarize his proposal in a one-page memo. Lemkin was aghast that he had to "compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death" in one page. But he managed, suggesting that the United States adopt a treaty banning barbarity and urging that the Allies declare the protection of Europe's minorities a central war aim. Several weeks later a courier relayed a message from the president. Roosevelt said he recognized the danger to groups but saw difficulties adopting such a law at the present. He assured Lemkin that the United States would issue a warning to the Nazis and urged patience. Lemkin was livid. "`Patience' is a good word to be used when one expects an appointment, a budgetary allocation or the building of a road," he noted. "But when the rope is already around the neck of the victim and strangulation is imminent, isn't the word `patience' an insult to reason and nature?""' He believed a "double murder" was being committed-one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second by the Allies, who knew about Hitler's extermination campaign but refused to publicize or denounce it. After he received word of Roosevelt's brush-off, Lemkin left the department and walked slowly down Constitution Avenue, trying not to think about what it meant for his parents.

He was sure politicians would always put their own interests above the interests of others.To stand any chance of influencing U.S. policy, he would have to take his message to the general public, who in turn would pressure their leaders. "I realized that I was following the wrong path," he later wrote. "Statesmen are messing up the world, and [only] when it seems to them that they are drowning in the mud of their own making, [do] they rush to extricate themselves.""' Those Americans who had been so responsive to Lemkin in person were not making their voices heard. And most Americans were uninterested. Lemkin told himself

All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren. Let me now tell this story to the American people, to the man in the street, in church, on the porches of their houses and in their kitchens and drawing rooms. I was sure they would understand me.... I will publish the decrees spreading death over Europe .... They will have no other choice but to believe. The recognition of truth will cease to be a personal favor to me, but a logical necessity."

As he lobbied for action in Washington and around the country in 1942 and 1943, he flashed back to a speech delivered by British prime minister Winston Churchill in August 1941, broadcast on the BBC, which had urged Allied resolve. "The whole of Europe has been wrecked and trampled down by the mechanical weapons and barbaric fury of the Nazis.... As his armies advance, whole districts are exterminated," Churchill had thundered. "We are in the presence of a crime without a name"3Z

Suddenly Lemkin's crusade took on a specific objective: the search for a new word. He replayed in his mind the Churchill speech and the response of the lawyers in Madrid to his proposal. Perhaps he had not adequately distinguished the crime he was campaigning against from typical, wartime violence. Maybe if he could capture the crime in a word that connoted something truly unique and evil, people and politicians alike might get more exercised about stopping it. Lemkin began to think about ways he might combine his knowledge of international law, his aim of preventing atrocity, and his long-standing interest in language. Convinced that it was only the packaging of his legal and moral cause that needed refining, he began to hunt for a term commensurate with the truth of his experience and the experience of millions. He would be the one to give the ultimate crime a name.

Raphael Lemkin

Chapter 3

The Crime

With a Name

"Believe the Unbelievable"

Although he did not realize it at the time, Lemkin belonged to a kind of virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses. A continent away, Szmul Zygielbojm, a fellow Polish Jew, was making arguments similar to those Lemkin registered in the U.S.War Department. In late May 1942, when reports of Nazi terror were still branded "rumors," Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish National Council in London, released and publicized a report prepared by the underground Jewish Socialist Bund in Poland. For the previous two years, Zygielbojm had been traveling around Europe and the United States describing ghastly conditions in occupied Poland, but the Bund report offered the most complete, precise, and chilling picture of Hitler's extermination plot. The Nazis had dispatched Einsatzgruppen, or mobile killing units, to conquered territory in eastern Europe. In Lithuania and Poland in the summer of 1941, the Bund reported,

men, fourteen to sixty years old, were driven to a single place, a square or a cemetery, where they were slaughtered or shot by machine guns or killed by hand grenades. They had to dig their own graves. Children in orphanages, inmates in old-age homes, the sick in hospital were shot, women were killed in the streets. In many towns the Jews were carried off to "an unknown destination" and killed in adjacent woods.'

The Bund report introduced readers to the gas vans that roamed around the Polish town of Chelmno, gassing an average of 1,000 people every day (ninety per van) from the winter of 1941 to March 1942. The report revealed that Germany had set out to "exterminate all the Jews of Europe." More than 700,000 Jews had already been killed; millions more were endangered. Its authors called upon the Polish government-in-exile to press the Allies to retaliate against German citizens in their countries.' Others urged the Allies publicly to link their bombing of Germany to Nazi atrocities and to drop leaflets over German territory informing German citizens of the atrocities. Zygielbojm appeared on the BBC on June 26, 1942, to deliver the same message. Speaking inYiddish, he read aloud a letter from a Jewish woman in one ghetto to her sister in another: "My hands are shaking. I cannot write. Our minutes are numbered. The Lord knows whether we shall see one another again. I write and weep. My children are whimpering. They want to live. We bless you. If you get no more letters from me you will know that we are no longer alive."The Bund report and the woman's letter, Zygielbojm said, were "a cry to the whole world."'

Earlier that year Jan Karski, a twenty-eight-year-old Polish diplomat and a Roman Catholic, had disguised himself as a Jew, donning an armband with the Star of David, and smuggled himself through a tunnel into the Warsaw ghetto. Posing as a Ukrainian militiaman, he also infiltrated Belzec, a Nazi death camp near the border between Poland and Ukraine. In late 1942 Karski escaped carrying hundreds of documents on miniature microfilm contained in the shaft of a key. He arranged to meet in London with Zygielbojm and his colleague, Ignacy Schwarzbart. On the eve of the meeting, Schwarzbart examined Karski's documents, and, aghast, cabled the World Jewish Congress in New York, describing the suffering of the Jews in Poland:

JEWS IN POLAND ALMOST COMPLETELY ANNIHILATED STOP READ REPORTS DEPORTATION TEN THOUSAND JEWS FOR DEATH STOP IN BELZEC FORCED TO DIG THEIR OWN GRAVE MASS SUICIDE HUNDREDS CHILDREN THROWN ALIVE INTO GUTTERS DEATH CAMPS IN BELZEC TREBLINKA DISTRICT MALKINIA THOUSANDS DEAD NOT BURIED IN SOBIBOR DISTRICT WLODAWSKI MASS GRAVES MURDER PREGNANT WOMEN STOP JEWS NAKED DRAGGED INTO DEATH CHAMBERS GESTAPO MEN ASKED PAYMENT FOR QUICKER KILLING HUNTING FUGITIVES STOP THOUSANDS DAILY VICTIMS THROUGHOUT POLAND STOP BELIEVE THE ITNBELIEI:4BLE STOP'

Karski net with Schwarzbart and Zygielbojm the next day in their office near Piccadilly Circus. He told them of naked corpses in the Warsaw ghetto, yellow stars, starving children, Jew hunts, and the smell of burning flesh. Karski relayed a personal message to Zygielbojm from Leon Feiner, the leader of the Bund trapped in Warsaw. Feiner had instructed Zygielbojm to stop with the empty protests and urge retaliatory bombing, leafleting, and the execution of Germans in Allied hands.' Karski said that when he had cautioned that the proposals were "bitter and unrealistic," Feiner had countered with: "We don't know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here! Say it!"" Karski, who had a photographic memory, recited Feiner's parting appeal to Jewish leaders to do something dramatic to force people to believe the reports:

We are all dying here; let the Jews in Allied countries] die too. Let them crowd the offices of Churchill, of all the important English and American leaders and agencies. Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest, not retreating until they will believe us, until they will undertake some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. This may shake the conscience of the world.

Upon hearing Feiner's message, Zygielbojni leaped from his seat and began pacing back and forth across the room. "It is impossible," he said, "utterly impossible.You know what would happen.They would simply bring in two policemen and have me dragged away to an institution.... Do you think they will let me die a slow lingering death? Never.... They would never let me die." As he continued questioning Karski, an agitated Zygielbojm pleaded with his messenger to believe he had done all he could. Two weeks later in a BBC broadcast Zygielbojm declared, "It will actually be a shame to go on living, to belong to the human race, if steps are not taken to halt the greatest crime in history"

Karski traveled to the United States and met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who graciously heard hint out and then responded, "I don't believe you."When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted him and explained, "I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you."9 Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, saw only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben- Gurion, and other leading Zionists."'

The Germans did their part, issuing ritual denials and cloaking the Final Solution in the euphemisms of"resettlement"Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda and national enlightenment, met atrocity reports by pointing to British abuses carried out in India and elsewhere, a tactic he deemed "our best chance of getting away from the embarrassing subject of the Jews"" The Swiss-based International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which documented the deportations, did not publicly protest because, it concluded, "public protests are not only ineffectual but are apt to produce a stiffening of the indicted country's attitude with regard to Committee, even the rupture of relations with it"'Z Intervention would be futile and would jeopardize the organization's ability to conduct prison inspections, deliver humanitarian parcels, and transmit messages among family members. Neutrality was paramount.

The Allies' suppression of the truth about Hitler's Final Solution has been the subject of a great deal of historical scholarship." Intelligence on Hitler's extermination was plentiful in both classified and open sources. The United States maintained embassies in Berlin until December 1941, in Budapest and Bucharest until January 1942, and in Vichy France until late 1942." The British used sophisticated decryption technology to intercept German communications. The major Jewish organizations had representatives in Geneva who relayed vivid and numerous refugee reports through Stephen Wise, the president of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and others. In July 1942, Gerhard Riegner, the WJC Geneva representative, informed the State Department of a well-placed German industrialist's report that Hitler had ordered the extermination of European Jewry by gassing. In November 1942, Rabbi Wise, who knew President Roosevelt personally, told a Washington press conference that he and the State Department had reliable information that some 2 million Jews had already been murdered. The Polish government-in-exile was a goldmine of information. Already by the fall of 1942, for instance, Zygielbojm had begun meeting regularly with Arthur J. Goldberg, General Bill Donovan's special assistant at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), to discuss the death camps.